Excerpt from 2017, June 23 PBS interview(yesterday) with Rev. William Barber II.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: In recent weeks, Reverend William Barber stepped down from heading the NAACP in North Carolina to focus on what he calls a national moral revival, updating the Poor People’s Campaign started by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that linked the civil rights struggle for African-Americans to demands for equality for all poor people.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II, Repairers of The Breach: There was this thing, if you will, called the white Southern strategy.
And the goal of it was undermine black and white fusion coalitions. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to figure out a way to talk that makes poor whites think that they’re losing because black people and brown people are gaining.
And what you do in that is, you make poor whites, who should be allies with poor blacks, think that their problem, their poverty is being caused because black and brown people are acquiring something or taking something from them.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So, what led you to try and bridge that gap, and what made you want to do that?
REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Dr. King said — back in the ’60s, he said, the only transformative force that could really, fully transform America would be for poor whites and blacks and brown people and working people to come together.
Excerpt from Only A Pawn In Their Game by Bob Dylan - 1964
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin, " they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used, it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
My take: My question is; So have we been spinning our wheels all these 47 years? Well no, we elected a black president but has this idea that both Williams and Dylan expose here, been articulated well enough that racism breaks down and fusion between the low-income white and black becomes reality?
The white man needs to be made to focus on this point but he has been manipulated to feel shame in giving credence to policies that will help the poor black even though it would help him and the dishonorable Trump just exploites it by using the ridiculous birther issue, dog whistle code words and as you have seen the low-income white man overwhelmingly supports Donald Trump.
He needs to be able to accept that he was used by white southern politicians then and that much of that mentality and manipulation is continued today through dog whistle politics.
The bottom line here being of course that same tactic survived and continues today.
So Rev. Williams is of course right on re-igniting this idea because it is at the very core of it all but I have to admit that interview and those lyrics from Bob Dylan almost seem like low points of which time between just froze. So i guess I'm saying; Shouldn't we be way past that now?
Again Rev Williams is spot on and we should articulate and even shame those that continue those old really astronomically dumbheaded tactics.
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